Lilith Interrupted

Lilith by ~Erina on deviantART

I was going to write about something else today, but I got interrupted, repeatedly, whilst I was doing it. I decided to scrap that post and write about interruptions instead. The interruptions stopped.

Not that long ago I would fly off the handle if I was interrupted. The interruption would turn into a fight, and the fight would then turn into a war of wills and emotions, which could last for days, even weeks. The thing which I was in the process of doing when so rudely interrupted, would get abandoned or finished off really badly due to my inability to concentrate on anything other than my anger at being interrupted and my desire to win the war I was waging against the trespassing interruptor.

The post I was going to write, was about Lilith. A friend asked me to jot down my thoughts. My knowledge of Lilith is scattered and scarce, but this friend and I like to swap astrological ideas.

I use astrology as a psychological tool, anything goes if it gives me access to the hidden recesses of my psyche, this means my approach to the subject is influenced by whatever answers I am seeking in the moment, and, therefore, I often ignore vast chunks of it because they do not appear to be relevant, useful, or needed. I’ll get around to them if and when, and not before, maybe never. Lilith is one of those chunks. At least, she is at the moment. I investigated her years ago, but the Lilith who interested me then was not an astrological Lilith, it was an allegorical Lilith. She helped me to understand something deeply personal, and to remove a shard of twisted metal from my heart.

So, Lilith, who is she? To me she is a person who rejected the roles imposed upon her by society, her parents, her peers, and followed her instinct, her nature, the beat of her inner drum. She chose to think for herself, to discover her own truths, write her own rules, and the consequences be damned, which in her case they truly were. She turned away from the light and accepted her darkness, not because she hated the light, but because she loved it, and her love made her a slave to it.  She loved the darkness as well, it freed her from her slavery to the light, but she knew that she would reject it too eventually, because it too would demand of her what she was unwilling to sacrifice. Her freedom. She even rejected her own creations to be free.

The moment you form an attachment to anything or anyone, you become embroiled, and that makes you subject to rules which are not your own.

Lilith’s need for freedom is not an attachment, it is a primal urge, the very essence of who she is, and what she embodies.

There, that’s my view of her. It is who she is from my perspective, seen through my eyes. Who she really and truly is, was, I do not know, nor do I need to know, not in her case anyway. One of the things which I have observed about Lilith is that she is whoever you think she is, she embodies whatever you pour into her, she reflects back at you what you project onto her. She is elusive. There are many versions of her, of her story, of her to use in your astrological chart. The version of her whom you pick to see, the story you prefer, the astrological entity you use, tells you more about you than they do about her. That is her gift to us. She is showing us what we need to know about ourselves so that we can embrace all the varied parts, accept the dark and the light, and eventually find our individual path to freedom.

As for interruptions, well, it dawned on me that my attitude towards them was causing more problems than the interruptions themselves. I decided to try a different approach. To welcome them. At first it was a gritted teeth smile I used to do so. I just wanted to deal with the source and cause of the interruption, get it out of the way, and get back to my own thing. Then I noticed a peculiarity. If I was interrupted during an email, when I returned to it, reread it to remind myself of what I was saying, I often found that I didn’t want to say that at all, so I’d scrap it and start again. In fact, I began to realise that interruptions more often than not were actually preventing me from making some very awkward mistakes. Even better than that, they occasionally took me on a detour which led me to a treasure I would have never found had I not been interrupted.